Sociology of Poetry

 

The arts, being social activities, have naturally attracted sociological analysis. Long ago Max Weber regarded art as a substitute for religion in advanced bourgeois societies, and that claim is often repeated in public funding of theatres, galleries, workshops and the like. Culture, if not art, is a desideratum of western societies, and the boundaries between art, culture and entertainment are not easily drawn. And if art is not justified as a spiritual good, then it should at least improve the quality of life. Money is a not only claim on services, but the final arbiter in free markets, so that even the most talented artist must find a commercial standing in a society not becoming noticeably more egalitarian or intelligent.

And what of fashion? It is idle to deny that even the most demanding of the arts escapes the stockmarket of intellectual fashion, or that what we profess to read does not reflect our education, social aspirations, perhaps even the sort of people we shall eventually become. And since we cannot read more than the smallest fraction on offer, we increasingly rely on reviews, which can be anything but fair or thorough. Indeed, some schools reject the whole notion of quality, seeing it as an elitist straitjacketing by a dominant, white, middle-class society.

What makes something catch on? Post your answers to MGM or HarperCollins. Everyone wants to know. Certain ingredients need to be present, but their mix is uncertain. Films are enormously expensive, and have to score with the public within a few days of release: hence the 30% of budget devoted to publicity. Publishers research the market, but are often surprised by the runaway bestseller which taps into something that has escaped analysis.

Is there any further point to fashion? That question has often been asked of the clothes industry, which seems increasing to parody the serious arts. By contemporary standards, the sixteenth-century poem is ridiculously overdressed: made of the finest material (deep argument), elaborately and painstakingly finished (craft), the product of a leisured (elitist) education that emphasized the social divide (client-patron). Poetry today is equally functional, but serves a wider spectrum: the decently churchgoing (Patience Strong style), the busy middle-class consumer (journalistic styles), ethnic minorities (rap and performance poetry), the socially committed (agi-prop poetry), the older generation (traditional), the trendier intellectual elite (Postmodernist) and so on, each with subdivisions blurred by continual social change. But note the word "serves". The poetry does not merely reflect sectional interests, but furthers them, gives them representation, allows symbiosis between groupings and their literary representations.

And that may explain the sometimes odd results of poetry festivals, competitions and publications. The Patience Strong school is often versified platitudes, inspiring little homilies that are not untrue but repeat what has been said in church magazines so many times before. The journalistic styles seem often no more than pleasing flippancies, a breezy reassurance that the world is indeed wholly contained in clichés taken from the Sunday supplements. Poetry of the ethnic minorities, though aggressively individual, often descends to a doggerel crude even by Victorian standards. The socially committed poetry has no answer to the world's manifest cruelties and injustices but conspiracies and capitalist caricatures. Traditional poetry aspires to the graces of an Edwardian country house party but sees no need for its verities to earn their living in the harsh contemporary world. Postmodernist poems often avoid all commonplaces of thought and diction to arrive at the vacuous and arbitrary.

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Sociology of Poetry


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